Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/557



"with the donations to Minerva Archegetia," [or the conductress,] by the god Caius Julius Caesar and his son the god Augustus, when Nicias was Archon." Over the middle of the pediment was a statue of Lucius Caesar, with this inscription:—"The people" [honor] "Lucius Caesar, the son of the Emperor Augustus Caesar, the son of the god." There was also a statue to Julia, the daughter to Augustus, and the mother of Lucius, thus inscribed:—"The Senate of the Areopagus, and the Senate of the Six Hundred" [dedicate this statue to] "the goddess Julia, Augusta, Provident." These public memorials supply an additional proof of the correctness of Paul's observations on the Athenians, that they were too much addicted to the adoption of objects for worship and devotion." (Hammond's Annot. Cave's Lives of the Apos., Horne's Introd.)
 * cription to the following purport:—"The people" [of Athens have erected this fabric]

As he concluded however, with the solemn declaration of the great foundation-truth of Christianity,—that God had raised Jesus from the dead,—there was a very general burst of contempt from the more scornful portion of his audience, at the idea of anything so utterly against all human probability. Of the immortality of the soul, the divinest of their own philosophers had reasoned,—and it was by most of the Athenian sects, considered on the whole, tolerably well established; but the notion of the actual revivification of the perished body,—the recall of the scattered dust and ashes, to the same breathing, moving, acting, thinking form, which for ages had ceased to be,—all amounted to a degree of improbable absurdity,—that not the wildest Grecian speculator had ever dreamed of. So the proud Epicureans and Stoics turned sneeringly away from the barbarian stranger who had come so far to try their credulity with such a tale; and thus they for ever lost the opportunity to learn from this new-opened fountain of truth, a wisdom that the long researches of all the Athenian schools had never reached and could never reach, without the light of this truly divine eastern source, which they now so thoughtlessly scorned. But there were some, more considerate, among the hearers of the apostle, who had learned that it is the most decided characteristic of a true philosopher, to reject nothing at first sight or hearing, though it may happen to be contrary to his own personal experience and learning; and these, weighing the matter with respectful doubt, told Paul—"We will hear thee again about this." Without any further attempt to unfold the truth at that time, Paul departed from the Areopagus, and no more uplifted his voice on the high places of Athens, in testimony of that solemn revelation of the Son of Man from the dead,—the conviction of whose truth, in spite of all philosophic sneers, was destined to oversweep the whole of that world which they knew, and a new one beyond it, and to exalt the name of that despised wanderer to